Category: SF&F Movie Reviews

Science Fiction and Fantasy Movie Reviews by otherworldly critics

Bad News – Good News

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So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Something Revolutionary and Unprecedented; Storytelling

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Today I had one of my grandsons over for a visit and after lunch Camera Girl asked if he wanted to watch the movie, “Catch Me if You Can.”  And he said sure, so I went looking for it in the DVDs.  But mysteriously it was missing.  So, she gave me a lot of grief because she said if I had said we didn’t have it she would have rented it at the library.  So blah, blah, blah … I said okay let’s watch “Captain America – Civil War.”  And he said sure.  Well aside from the commercials (I recorded it a couple of days ago) that I had to annoyingly fast forward through it was the typical Marvel Universe CGI extravaganza.  Well, mostly.  Since it wasn’t billed as an “Avengers” movie it didn’t have the full ensemble; Hulk and Thor were missing.  But with all of the minor heroes and the addition of Bucky (aka the Winter Soldier), Black Panther, Ant Man and Spiderman it was pretty damn crowded.

And because the title included the words civil war, what most of the action scenes consisted of was the heroes divided into two opposing factions battling each other.  So, Iron Man and his crew were battling Captain America and his backers.  Now it’s not a hundred percent clear whether they meant to kill each other.  I guess we’re supposed to assume not.

But here’s the thing.  The offensive and defensive capabilities of these various characters are woefully mismatched.  Even without Thor and Hulk who are basically unkillable, the abilities of the minor characters who are basically normal human beings without any special armor or weapons, are laughably insufficient to either harm the stronger characters or even survive a serious fight with them.  Take one obvious feature.  How does someone who can’t fly fight with someone who can?  And there are plenty of other problems like that.  It leads to an absurdity where the weaker characters are just dancing around trying to avoid being squashed flat by the heavy hitters.  And this looks ridiculous.  It looks like a jar full of hornets buzzing around in a jar, to no particular result.  And this is especially egregious with the female characters.  Even though somehow Black Widow (basically Scarlett Johansson in tight leather pants) is able to easily fight and kill a half dozen much larger men without effort, it defies all the laws of physics that she can attack a man in an armored suit that’s so heavily built that it allows him to survive anything short of an artillery shell going off in his lap.  He shouldn’t even notice her attack and she should basically break every bone in her hands punching him.

Now of course superhero movies are based on the idea of fantasy.  So sure, let the girl fight her way through the bad guys.  That’s what we expect.  But in general, the mixing of unkillable and highly lethal characters with humans whose only superpower is wearing a spandex costume, just doesn’t make very entertaining cinema.  The only time these movies make good watching is when two powerful and very evenly matched characters are set against one another.  So, in the original Iron Man movie Tony Stark and his former partner; Obadiah Stane have powered suits that at least are in the same ballpark of capability.  This allows brains and experience to allow the fight to resolve itself in an interesting way.  In the original Captain America film Steve Rogers and Johann Schmidt are both super soldiers (biologically enhanced) and therefore on a relatively level playing field.  In the original Thor movie, the antagonists are both immortal Norse gods.  This level playing field in each movie makes the conflict less improbable and more interesting as theater.

So, I am not surprised that stacking more and more heroes and villains of completely unequal and confusing capabilities just makes the action scenes an unholy mess with very little tension or enjoyment.  And now it seems the audience has grown tired of all this crowded hyperactive choreography.  It’s grown stale and annoying.  And the numbers are going down at the box office.  Maybe it’s time for the Marvel Universe to try something revolutionary and unprecedented; storytelling.

Nature Finds a Way

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In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.

Of course they’ve vanished.  All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published.  You can’t have adventure for boys.  You can’t leave the girls behind.  You can’t even have them following along.  They have to be in charge.

So, boys stopped reading books.  Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies.  So, what did the movie studios do then?  They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.

So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games.  And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.

You see the pattern.

Now, there is the flip side of this progression.  First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books.  No one bought their books.  Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking.  If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female.  And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.

Well, I think that is beginning to end.  There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern.  And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games.  And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”

Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games.  These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers.  And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies.  Think about that.  Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.

Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex.  You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence.  As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”

I find this both fascinating and encouraging.  These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild.  That is an immensely encouraging thing.  And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative.  No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt.  No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton.  No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.

Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment.  But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not).  I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world.  And it might be that the future isn’t female.

Shatnerkhan VIII Will Have to be Convened

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Shades of Mediocrity!  Mother of Mercy!  Can this be the end of Shatner?  Or at least Kirk?

William Shatner – A Demigod of Bad Acting

Well, here we go again.  You know maybe Trump can appoint Shatner to some kind of ambassadorship to Canada or Hollywood or some other make believe place.  Or maybe Elon can shoot his rotund corroded hulk to Mars as a send-off.

October Viewing – 9

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October Viewing – 9

So, this being October 30th and tomorrow a really long work day, it’s a pretty good bet this will be the last “October Viewing” of the year.  A good friend who has been following this series of posts proposed the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movies as a good subject.  And we both liked how it sort of dovetails with the whole woke Democrat pod-people meme.  You know, how they speak like lifeless automatons and point and shriek if you reveal yourself not to be one of them.

Now my friend felt that even the two reboots were good subjects for the post.  But as in all things I am conservative.  So, let’s harken back to the 1956 original in all its black and white splendor.  Dut, dut, dut daaaah!

Spoiler alert!  If you want to avoid knowing the plot, skip to the boldened text below to just get my opinion.

Sturdy character actor Kevin McCarthy (no, not the politician!) stars as Dr. Miles J. Bennell.  He’s a small-town doctor in the fictitious California town of Santa-something-or-other.  Miles is puzzled to find that several patients are claiming that their friends and relatives have been replaced by visually identical individuals that lack any emotion.  One case is a young child claiming his mother has been replaced.

So, Miles and his girlfriend Becky and their friend Jack and his wife “Teddy” begin investigating a very strange series of occurrences.  Jack finds what looks like a human body but with very indistinct features, almost as if acid had burned away the facial features.  Shockingly, over time the “body” begins to take on Jack’s features.  And more of these bodies begin appearing.  Eventually they learn that enormous seed pods are the source of these transforming “bodies.”

And soon the two couples discover that the great majority of the townspeople are pod people.  The distinguishing characteristic of pod people is a complete lack of emotion in their voice and actions.  While pursuing an unsuccessful attempt to broadcast this alarming news to the rest of the outside world, Jack and Teddy become “podified” and so Jack provides the exposition to Miles and Becky to explain exactly what the hell is going on.

In his sedate pod-man voice Jack explains that spores floating through outer space landed on Earth where they grew into the pods.  If a pod is placed near someone (how near?) and that person falls asleep the pod will absorb the person’s memories and appearance and somehow disintegrate the real person and replace him.  Jack tries to convince Miles and Becky that the procedure is painless and all for the good.  Miles and Becky decide not to cooperate and run away.  They try to escape from town.  But they have to pass through a crowd of pod-people who are loading up trucks with seed pods for delivery to the surrounding towns.  They try to act like pod-people by being emotionless but are given away by Becky’s scream when she witnesses a traffic accident.  Women!

The pod people chase after them but the couple successfully take refuge in a cave that was conveniently around when they needed it.  But when Miles goes out to scout an escape route Becky falls asleep and by the time Miles returns, she’s fully podified and sounds the alarm to the rest of the wooden-faced pursuers to catch Miles.

Sleep-deprived Miles runs in a nightmarish state and ends up in another town trying to warn people on the highway about the pod people.  Of course, they assume he’s nuts and drag him to a hospital where he tells his story to the skeptical doctors.  But just at the end of his story an emergency room worker reports that a traffic accident with a truck full of giant seed pods has produced casualties in the ER.  And so, the doctors get to work calling in the FBI!

Dunt, dunt daaah!

End of the spoiler alert!

So, as you can see this is a hum-dinger of a paranoid’s dream come true.  They’re all out to get you and they’re all monsters.  And the emotionless pod-people are a pretty good stand in for the swarms of antidepressant-doped leftists that walk the Earth all around us and can only summon energy when they point and shriek to their cohort about the presence of some normal human in the immediate vicinity.

And this is the modern horror story.  If you add a violent angle with the imposters capable of becoming murderous creatures like in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” then it’s doubly frightening, especially with the modern special effects available.

But even this old-fashioned cinematic portrayal hits home by showing the confusion when familiar surroundings aren’t what they seem.  And when the truth is doubted by everyone except the growing crowd of pod-people who are coming after you then panic results.  Yep, a perfect nightmare scenario.  It does resemble the current state of our world too.  But I’ll save that for a current events post.

October Viewing – 8

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Tonight, I got around to rewatching “Sleepy Hollow.”  This 1999 movie starred Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, a New York City lawman whose scientific methods were too advanced for 1799.  He is sent upstate to solve a string of murders that all involve the victims being left headless.  Christina Ricci stars as Katrina Van Tassel the daughter of a prosperous businessman whose family is at the center of the ring of murders.  And, of course Katrina is Ichabod’s love interest in the movie.

Spoiler alert; skip down to the last paragraph to avoid spoilers and just read the recommendation.

What we learn is that, just as in the Washington Irving stories about Sleepy Hollow, the countryside is haunted by the ghost of a Hessian soldier that was killed during the American Revolutionary War.  The Hessian lost his head during a battle with the Americans and his spirit has haunted the neighborhood ever since.  In our story, the Hessian (when he has a head) is played by Cristopher Walken.  And when he doesn’t have a head, well, who knows?

Being a man of reason, Ichabod disbelieves the stories about the ghost and claims the murders were the result of human efforts.  He claims this until he actually sees the Headless Horseman kill a couple of townspeople.  But once Ichabod recovers from his shock, he determines that he will investigate the ghost and figure out a way to end the string of murders.

And after most of the prominent townspeople are murdered, Ichabod realizes that the horseman is controlled by someone inside the town who understands black magic.  And that turns out to be Katrina’s stepmother (naturally).  There is a showdown and Ichabod figures out how to turn the horseman against the witch and save Katrina from being decapitated by the head-lopping Hessian.

Sleepy Hollow was a Tim Burton film and so it is no surprise that the look of the film stylishly captures the eerie, misty atmosphere of this dark fairy tale land.  The movie is always at least half comedy and Depp is very good as the always squeamish but determinedly, reluctantly brave man of science doing his best to solve the mystery and save his love interest from a gruesome fate.  While this tongue in cheek approach does not allow the movie to ever frighten us, it does succeed (in my opinion) in entertaining the audience.  The special effects around the character of the horseman aren’t quite up to the current state of the art CGI standards.  Nevertheless, his scenes are very well choreographed and look splendid.  The supporting cast do a creditable job of moving the plot forward one severed head at a time.  I’m going to recommend this movie to anyone who likes fantasy and the supernatural.  Here’s a natural pick for October viewing.

October Viewing – 7

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The Wolf Man (1941)

I figured it was time to review Lon Chaney Jr.’s magnum opus.  The first thing that is apparent is that Claude Rains was an order of magnitude above the rest of the actors.  Well, Rains was two orders beyond Chaney.  But I will say that in the non-monster related earlier part of the movie the scenes with Chaney and his father and with the girl were fun to watch.  As Larry Talbot, Chaney was engaging and sympathetic.  But once he started killing werewolves and becoming a werewolf he became increasingly annoying and neurotic about telling everyone about how tough it was being a werewolf.  Me, me, me.  Very needy.

Incidentally, they killed off Bela Lugosi about ninety seconds into the only screen time he was given.  And to add insult to injury, they didn’t even bother to give him an original character name.  They called him Bela!  I mean, how lousy is that?  They probably paid him by the hour and sent him packing after his scene to save money.  Very sad.

And I noticed something very strange about the wolf man character.  Right before Larry Talbot  goes out on his first killing spree, he notices hair growing on his body.  He takes off a white shirt leaving him in a white undershirt (incidentally a wife beater style).  Then he takes off his shoes and socks and we watch his feet becoming paws while he is sitting in a chair.  Then still focusing on his legs he gets up, apparently heading out the window of his room to go find the grave digger and rip out his throat.  But in the next shot we see the wolf man in a dark colored button down shirt.

Now are we supposed to believe that the Wolf Man went into Larry Talbot’s closet, picked out a matching shirt and using his front paws, buttoned it up and headed out for a bite to eat?  I don’t know.  I mean it was a nice shirt but just how far is my suspension of disbelief supposed to stretch.  I feel like I’m being abused here.

Well, anyway, after Claude Rains clubs Lon Chaney Jr. to death with his own silver wolf-headed walking stick, the gypsy lady recites that, “The way he walked was thorny” doggerel over poor Larry’s corpse and the music soars and the credits roll.

But i don’t know.  I feel kind of cheated.  I feel like Larry’s ghost should have appeared and complained about the bum deal he got.  He’s living in California for eighteen years, helping to build the Mt Wilson observatory.  Then his elder brother dies so he returns to Talbot Castle to take up the role of heir apparent to his father’s title (baronet?) and after just a couple of days he’s bitten by a werewolf and beaten to death by his own dad.  And what fun did he actually have?  He only managed to kill one crummy grave digger.  It doesn’t seem fair.  At least if he’d gotten a chance to sink his teeth into Gwen Conliffe’s throat he’d have a story to tell the other dearly departed monsters like Dracula and the Mummy.  But as things stand he seems to have been given short shrift.

Alright.  That’s enough.  So all in all the movie starts off well and ends a little flat.  Perhaps I’ll consider Larry Talbot’s run in with Abbott and Costello more successful.

October Viewing – 6

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Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – A Science Fiction-Fantasy Movie Review

First of all, I assume everyone knows the plot of Dracula, so there will be no spoiler alert.  I’ve been wanting to review this movie for a while because I read that it was pretty good.  Well, pretty good is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

This movie is all over the place.  First off look at some of the cast members:

Gary Oldman as Count Dracula

Winona Ryder as Mina Harker

Anthony Hopkins as Professor Van Helsing

Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker

So, you can imagine the range of acting ability here.  Oldman and Hopkins do the best they can with the script and dialog but Reaves and Ryder … are Reaves and Ryder, so you can imagine.  Keanu is especially notable for his amazing 19th century British accent.  I keep expecting him to exclaim, “Whoa!”

Alright, so let’s talk about the approach to the Dracula story.  Apparently, by the movie’s name, director Francis Ford Coppola intended for this film to be seen as adhering, to some extent, more closely to Stoker’s novel than most other versions.  I read the novel many, many years ago but from what I remember there were no nekkid vampire women sexing up Jonathan Harker at Castle Dracula.  And, granted, unlike many other versions of the story, the end of this movie does take place where and how it occurred in the book, but Coppola added Mina Harker into the climax to close out her romance with Dracula.  That’s not Stoker.  Also, the movie starts off in the 15th century with Vlad the Impaler renouncing God because his wife (who is also played by Ryder) committed suicide and therefore she cannot go to heaven.  And because of all this, we are supposed to see Dracula as a sympathetic character and at the end he gets this redemption scene where instead of looking like this decrepit bat-like thing he turns back into young and relatively handsome Vlad and dies the beautiful death (well, he still gets his head chopped off but he does get a nice moment).  So, Bram Stoker’s Dracula?  Some yes and a lot no.

The special effects are pretty good for 1992.  And the sets and costumes look like they cost a bundle.  I didn’t hate the whole movie.  I rather enjoyed most of Hopkins’ Van Helsing and a lot of Oldman’s spoken part was well done.  I think what I objected to was Ryder’s absurdly emotional scenes with Dracula.  I guess we’re supposed to imagine that the Mina Harker character must have some kind of psychic link to Vlad’s dead wife and this compels her to fall hopelessly in love with the undead and mostly repulsive looking creature that has very recently murdered her best friend, Lucy.

So, let’s say there is some kind of twisted logic to this take.  But since this is framed as a Christian legend, complete with crucifixes and holy water are we supposed to add in an un-Christian example of reincarnation?  And somehow God is going to forgive Vlad for four centuries of murdering people because Winona Ryder loves him?  I could be wrong but I don’t think that’s how it works.  Someone named Vlad the Impaler is going to need a much stronger advocate than that when he gets to the Pearly Gates.

Alright, I’ll put all my quibbles aside.  What’s the verdict?  Well, since this is a Dracula movie then as a Dracula movie it provides blood and gore, a castle with frightened Transylvanian peasants nearby, a vampire that can turn into bats, wolves and mist and is attractive to female victims and a final scene with a stake and even a decapitation.  So, successful, I guess.  But Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder?  That’s not helping.

October Viewing – 5

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I was all over the place deciding on what I should watch next, I considered two movies that are genuinely disturbing; “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs.”  I couldn’t decide between them so I put them aside.  Then I started watching “Carnival of Souls.”  But although that movie has some truly disturbing images, the majority of the film is so devoid of acting, interest or sympathetic characters that I turned it off in disgust.  I may go back to it later.  As I said it has some potent imagery but I just wasn’t in the mood to subject myself to its depressing banality.

I decided to watch the 1932 “The Mummy.”

Of course this is a movie I’ve already reviewed.  But I needed something fun and also, I wanted see what I could extract from it by giving it a pair of fresh eyes.  So, I tried to imagine what the crowd of 1932 would see in it.

I looked through some of the older and newer discussions about the production and what was common to them all was the link to the King Tutankhamen discovery in the 1920’s.  Apparently, that archeological discovery had been enormously popular with the general public and so the filmmakers were right in thinking that a horror movie that piggybacked on ancient Egypt was likely to be popular.

And so, they cobbled together the story line of the Egyptian priest who was buried alive for stealing the secret of resurrection from the sacred Scroll of Thoth to bring back to life his great love; the Princess Anck-es-en-Amon.  Of course, whenever Karloff chants the name in the movie it sounds like “ankhs and almonds.”  Which made me think of some kind of mummy-themed breakfast cereal like Count Chocula but more health conscious like Honey Nut Cheerios.

But I digress.

So, I could see the audience of young men and teenagers bringing their girls to be frightened by the monster and thereby getting to hug them for moral support.

But what about the modern audience?  Well, my favorite scene is the initial discovery of the mummy and the chest holding the scroll of Thoth.  In this scene the character played by Edward Van Sloane, the same actor who plays Professor Van Helsing in Dracula and Doctor Waldman in Frankenstein is once again warning the impetuous skeptics about the dangers of interfering in the dark arts.  But of course, the young archeologist opens the chest and begins reading the scroll and so, awakes Imhotep (Karloff) who absconds with the scroll and leaves shocked scientist laughing psychotically and headed for death in a strait jacket.

This is the only scene where we see Karloff in his mummy makeup.  It was well made.  He looked quite like a 4,000-year-old corpse.  After that the story goes downhill.  Twelve years later the British Museum expedition is back in Egypt but now the son of the previous expedition’s leader is in charge and after receiving a hint as to where to dig, by Ardath Bey (the mummy pretending to be a modern Egyptian), they dig up the undisturbed tomb of ankhs and almonds.  Once she is safely deposited in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities Ardath Bey begins to work at resurrecting his former love.  And by reading passages from the scroll, he is able to lure ankhs and almonds present reincarnation (a pretty half-English half-Egyptian girl who happens to be Edward Van Sloane’s medical patient).

She falls in love with the young archeologist and it’s a photo-finish to see if she ends up with Ardath Bey as a murdered but re-animated corpse like him or her modern self marrying the Englishman.  In the intervening struggle the older archeologist is murdered by Ardath Bey and hijinks ensue.  In the final showdown the girl remembers her past life and enough ancient Egyptian language to make a prayer to the statue of Isis to help her by zapping Imhotep with her ankh which both burns up the scroll of Thoth and turns the mummy into a pile of bones.

Being in my senior years I was disturbed to see how little concern the younger archeologist seemed to exhibit at his father’s death.  I mean sure, the guy was old but at least a day or two of mourning before proceeding with his pursuit of the hot-looking former Egyptian princess should have been a reasonable thought.  Well, that is the essence of life.  And she was pretty alluring in her more scantily clad scenes.  So, I guess I can cut him some slack.

All in all, it’s a decently entertaining film.  Allowances have to be made for the definition of scary a hundred years ago but it’s a fun film.  I’ll give it a thumbs up as a light-hearted October viewing.

Update:
War Pig commented:

I, too, am intrigued by what Americans found frightening a century ago. Of course with modern special effects a scary film from today would cause a stampede out the doors of a roaring twenties theater and a call for congress to ban or restrict such films. I also find it curious that naked bodies and other sexual scenes were made verboten while wholesale slaughter and bloodshed were allowed when the 1930s movie codes were mandated.

For me, simple shock and violence are moot. I want suspense. Old classics like Night Of The Demon, Black Sunday, Psycho, Night Of The Hunter or Hour Of The Wolf and Rashoman. There’s just something about black & White cinematography that lends itself to horror movies. Masters of the craft such as Bergman, Hitchcock, Brava and Kurosawa used it to great effect. Horror, and suspense, are best served in black and white where you have to concentrate on the story instead of the fancy effects.

photog replied

Yes, a century has removed all the taboos.  But as you say gore and shock don’t guarantee satisfaction with the product.  Engage our imagination and gore isn’t that important.

October Viewing – 4

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I thought of an interesting choice for tonight; the 2023 movie “Nefarious.”  I hadn’t watched the movie since it came out last year.  I had forgotten how good it is.  The malevolence and twitchiness of the Nefarious character and the step-by-step demolition of the psychiatrist’s composure and then his mental balance is fascinating to watch.  The creative team (including the actors) crafted an intricate little machine that advances the plot one ratchet tooth at a time and then brings us to the electrocution room in the penultimate scene.

And the electrocution of the demon’s host provides all the horror that is needed for a Halloween movie.  They even have to “fry” him twice for good measure.  And even though this film was made by a “Christian” production studio and has a clear message concerning the reality of evil in the world, that messaging does not overpower the dramatic balance.  The story works as a story for any audience.  I guess for non-believers they’ll just have to chalk up the strange events to psychological phenomena, such as multiple personality syndrome and autosuggestion.

Comparing this movie to other films I think the confrontation with Nefarious is somewhat akin to Agent Starling interacting with Hannibal Lector in “Silence of the Lambs.”  Of course, not exactly because there was a certain sympathy that Lector felt for Starling.  Whereas Nefarious is wholly bent on the destruction of everyone around him including the psychiatrist.  But there is the same sense that a malevolent genius is toying with his jailors.

And the other comparison that this movie conjures up in my mind is C. S. Lewis’s “The Screwtape Letters.”  In both works you get to see the demon’s point of view.  Nefarious at a certain point has to prove to the psychiatrist that there is a logic to the whole idea of demonic possession.  He has to explain how it’s done and how it advances the goals of Nefarious’ master.  And from what I can tell I think he used pretty orthodox doctrine on how and why Satan carries out his war against Heaven and mankind.

So, all in all I think I made a pretty good choice for tonight’s movie.  Of course, whether I watch the movie for Halloween or Easter is a matter of mood.  After all, you really can’t consider Hell without contrasting it with the establishment run by the power whom Nefarious calls “the Enemy.”  But even for atheists I think Nefarious is a pretty good choice for this time of year.  And to round off this post I’d like to say that all of the actors in this little teleplay acquitted themselves very ably.  But the actor who portrayed Nefarious was especially good.  If they gave Academy Award nominations to actors in movies made by Christian production companies then he would have deserved one for the performance he gave.  And the actors who played the psychiatrist and the warden were also top notch.

Well, if you’re looking for a good scary movie, I highly recommend Nefarious.  Give the devil his due.